Archive for December 2011

Growing up in a rural village in N.Ireland it was common that ministers who came to town as a guest preacher used a particular phrase (they obviously assumed we’d never heard before and they obviously thought would waow us). The phrase was this…”you may know much about someone but that’s not the same as knowing them” for example they’d say…”I could tell you many things about Ryan Gigs (evidence of cultural connection) but I don’t know him. And in the same way you may know much about God without knowing him.

But I was thinking about this phrase the other day and it occurred to me that when you do know someone the opposite is true. In-other-words, the more I know about my husband the more I know him. My intellectual knowing of him feeds my (experiential?) knowing. In this case knowing about someone is inextricable from knowing them.

Knowing about God helps us to know him more. We need to never stop knowing with our minds.

Thinking about this has also now made me suspicious of the origional premise. If one kind of knowing leads to the other in one case then I’m pretty sure it must do so in all cases…

Perhaps knowing about someone doesn’t make you any more likely to meet them but if you did meet them you’d certainly know them better than if you met them without knowing anything about them.